Darling Dead Boy
by fortescue
Summary: ("These Make Humanity" remake. fem!percy. au). Armed with a take-no-prisoners attitude, her camera, a Magic 8-Ball, and her only ally, Pallas wages a war against her schizophrenia, determined to stay sane long enough to get through sixth grade. She's pretty optimistic about her chances until classes begin, and she runs into an old imaginary friend.
1. i

**alternate title** \- these make humanity

 **characters** \- original characters, harpalyce "pallas" jackson, grover underwood, annabeth chase, silena beauregard, lee fletcher

 **an** \- this is going to be a remake of my story these make humanity, which is a short, unfinished collection of one-shots in non chronological order. so I'm going to be finishing that collection in this story - which a few changes. everything you recognize belongs to rick riordan.

* * *

"do you think i go down willingly?  
she pushed, i pulled;  
the ocean pulled, too, that savage mother,  
and i  
pushed–  
for the surface,  
for my life,  
for the light,  
the  
light.

my mother never told me how strong her kind was, or how  
terrifyingly, monstrously beautiful.  
(like the sea that spawned her, like the sea, the sea)  
and my father, well, he never taught me much,  
before the sea swallowed him too.  
( _son_ , _be careful of the currents_ , _they are_  
 _deceitful_ , he told me, but not much else.  
no time for anything else. the sea  
devoured him whole, ate him hungrily,  
like the whale and the prophet.)

you thought it was love at first sight,  
that we were lovers. how terribly poetic of you  
and  
how  
ridiculously  
naive.

she dragged me down and i fought for my life,  
fought tooth and nail and claw,  
but her hunger was stronger than mine.  
she was the ocean, unrelenting,  
and she broke me into pieces on the shoreline.

i've drowned  
in the cathedral of blue,  
a sacrifice to the soul of the ocean,  
and all you can say was  
 _even_  
 _lovers_  
 _drown_. that  
we'll drown  
those  
we  
love (in our selfishness, our hunger).

we were not lovers.  
i did not love my murderer.  
you misunderstand;  
this is not  
a  
love  
story.

she tasted  
like foul air  
rotting fishes  
and unholiness  
when she kissed me.  
i know  
i  
was going  
to  
die.

the ocean takes no prisoners,  
know no love.  
 _son_ , _the currents are deceitfu_ l,  
my dead father has said,  
before it took him  
like  
it  
took  
me _._ "

\- darling dead boy, who had been  
swimming before the mermaid  
claimed him as her own ( **s.p.** )

* * *

Reality, it turns out, is not often what you perceive it to be - sometimes, there really is someone out to get you.

Pallas fights a daily battle to figure out the difference between reality and delusion. Armed with a take-no-prisoners attitude, her camera, a Magic 8-Ball, and her only ally, Pallas wages a war against her schizophrenia, determined to stay sane long enough to get through the new school year. She's pretty optimistic about her chances until classes begin, and she runs into an old imaginary friend.

( _Didn't she imagine him?_ )

Before she knows it, Pallas is making friends, figuring out the truth, and experiencing all the usual rites of passage for demigods. But Pallas is used to being crazy. She's not prepared for normal. Even if it's the sort of "normal" for demigods.

She knows something is going to happen. And soon.

* * *

 _You really aren't all that helpful._  
 **It is decidedly so**  
 _Glad we're on the same page._


	2. ii

**updated - 9.20.15**

* * *

If Pallas was good at the market, she would get a blue gatorade. If she was really good, she would get to see the lobsters.

Today, she was really good.

Pallas' mother, Sally, left Pallas at the lobster tank while she went to grab (Smelly) Gabe's pork chops from the deli counter. Lobsters were fascinating - to Pallas, at least. Everything from their name to their claws to their red color had her hooked. It made her sad that they had to live in such dirty water, as opposed to the clear blue waters at Montauk beach.

Pallas tugged on her hair and scrutinized the lobsters. Sally said her eyes were ocean green. Smelly Gabe said they're green like the water her _precious lobsters_ were trapped in.

Still pulling at her brown curls, she couldn't tell if her step-dad was right. Part of her didn't want Smelly Gabe nor Sally to be right. She didn't have a mirror, and while the tank glass reflected her face, it was a distorted and dim reflection, so she couldn't tell if her eyes really were dirty water green.

" _Let me out_ ," said the lobster.

He always said that. He could at least say _please_.

Pallas rubbed her hand against the glass like the tank was a genie's lamp and the action would stir up some magic. Maybe, somehow, she could get those lobsters out. They all looked so sad to Pallas, huddled on top of one another to make a tower up to the top, antennae twitching, claws rubber-banded together. They reminded her of, well, _her_.

"Are you buying one?"

Pallas saw the boy's reflection in the glass of the lobster tank before he spoke. Big blue eyes.

Blueberry blue.

 _No, that was too dark_.

Ocean blue?

 _Too green_.

Blue like all the blue crayons Pallas owned melted into one.

The straw Pallas had put down the neck of her plastic bottle dangled from her lips.

"Are you buying one?" he said again.

Pallas shook her head, causing her long braid to swing. The boy pushed his glasses up his nose, back into place on his golden-freckled cheeks. Pallas automatically labelled him as younger, because he was shorter by a few obvious inches. The sleeves of his worn sweater hid his hands, and hung off his shoulders, which were also freckled. He smelled like pond scum and fish.

"Did you know fossils of the clawed lobster date back to the Cretaceous Period?" Blue Eyes asked. Pallas shook her head - she would have to ask her mom what a ' _Cretaceous'_ was - and took a long, obnoxious drink of the blue gatorade.

Blue Eyes was staring at Pallas and not the lobster. " _Animalia Arthropoda Malacostraca Decapoda Nephropidae_ ," he said. He tripped a little on the last word, but it didn't matter to Pallas because she hadn't understood a syllable that had come out of his mouth.

"I like scientific classification," Blue Eyes said.

"I dunno know what that means," Pallas admitted, her cheeks flaring.

Blue Eyes pushed his glasses up again. They were like grandma glasses: circular, with a golden-wire frame. " _Plantae Sapindales Rutaceae Citrus_."

"I don't know what that means, either."

"You smell like lemons."

Pallas felt a flurry of butterflies because he'd said, " _You smell like lemons_ " instead of " _Your eyes are green_." Pallas knew her eyes were green. Everyone with working eyes could see her eyes were green. There weren't a lot of people with green eyes, but that didn't mean people had to keep reminding her of that - just another little fact that made her stand out from the common people to add onto her biography. The dyslexia and ADHD didn't help.

Pallas didn't, however, know that she smelled like lemons.

"You smell like fish," Pallas told him, as if _You smell like fish_ was just a good a compliment as _You smell like lemons_.

Blue Eyes hunched his shoulders, causing the light to reflect off his glasses. "I know."

Sally was still standing in line at the deli counter, and didn't seem to have any plans to collect Pallas soon.

Grinning, Pallas grabbed the boy's hand. Blue Eyes jumped and stared at their joined hands like something both magical and dangerous had happened.

"Do you wanna be friends?" Pallas asked, her grin now maniacal\\-like.

He looked up and reset his glasses once again, mumbling a timid "Okay."

"Cool." Pallas raised her drink. "Gatorade?"

"What?"

Pallas pushed the drink a little closer to Blue Eyes' face, in case he hadn't seen it. He took the bottle and inspected the straw.

"Mom says I shouldn't drink after someone else. It's unsanitary."

Pallas frowned. "But it's gatorade. _Blue_ gatorade."

Blue Eyes looked uncertainly at the bottle before taking a wimpy sort of sip and shoving the drink back Pallas' way. He didn't move for a second, didn't speak, but, eventually, he took it back for another drink.

As it turned out, Blue Eyes knew a lot more than scientific classifications. He knew _everything_. He knew the prices of everything in the market. He knew how much it would cost to buy all the lobsters in the lobster tank ($101.68, sales tax not included). He knew the names of all the presidents and what order they served in. He knew the Roman emperors, which impressed Pallas even more. He knew that the circumference of the Earth was forty thousand kilometres.

But he really knew words. Blue Eyes had a word for everything. Words like _sillage_ (the act of leaving a trail, like the scent of perfume in the air) and _viridian_ (the colour of Pallas' eyes, according to him). Words that would've sat on Pallas' tongue like a drop of oil.

Pallas didn't understand most of what Blue Eyes said, but she didn't mind. He was the first friend she ever had. The first real friend.

Also, she liked holding his hand.

"Why do you smell like fish?" Pallas asked her newfound companion. The two walked along the length of the main aisle, repeatedly passing Sally, though she seemed to make no notice of the pair.

"I was in a pond," he replied.

"Why?"

"I was thrown in."

"Why?"

He shrugged and reached down to scratch at his legs, which were covered in all sorts of Band-Aids.

"Why're you hurt?"

" _Animalia Annelida Hirudinea_."

The foreign words sounded like a curse. His cheeks glowed red once more and he scratched at a green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Band-Aid fervently. His eyes had gone watery by the time they stopped at the lobster tank.

One of the market employees came out from behind the seafood counter and opened a hatch on the lobster tank. With a gloved hand, he reached in and pulled out one of the lobsters at the top. He closed the hatch and carried the lobster off back behind the deli counter.

And Pallas had an idea.

"Cm'ere." Pallas pulled Blue Eyes to the back of the tank. He wiped his glasses. Pallas stared at him until he stared back. "Help me get the lobsters out?"

Blue Eyes sniffed, then nodded.

Pallas set her gatorade bottle on the floor and held her arms high up over her head. "Can you lift me?"

Blue Eyes wrapped his arms around Pallas' waist and lifted the girl up. Her head shot above the top of the lobster tank, her shoulders almost level with the hatch. Pallas expected Blue Eyes to snap in half, but he only grunted, wobbling a bit.

"Just try to hold still," Pallas told him.

The hatch had a handle near the edge. Pallas grabbed the cold metal and pulled it open, shivering at the chilly blast of air that whooshed out.

"What are you doing?" Blue Eyes asked, his voice muffled by his strain and Pallas' shirt.

"Be quiet!" Pallas said, as politely as she could, looking around. No one had noticed them yet. The lobsters were piled up just below the hatch. Pallas hesitantly dipped her hand in, a violent shiver racing up her spine from the cold. Her small fingers closed around the nearest lobster. Pallas expected it to thrash its claws and curl and uncurl its tail, but it didn't. She felt like she was holding a heavy shell that she'd found on the beach. She pulled her arm out quickly.

" _Thank you_ ," the lobster said.

"You're welcome," Pallas mumbled. She dropped it on the ground.

Blue Eyes stumbled, but didn't lose his grip on Pallas. The lobster sat there for a moment, maybe in shock, but then started crawling along the tile. Pallas reached in for another. And another. And another. And soon the tank of lobsters was crawling across the tile floor of the supermarket. Pallas didn't have a clue as to where they were going, but they seemed to have a good idea.

Pallas felt proud of herself, to say in the least.

Blue Eyes dropped Pallas with a huff and they landed in a puddle of cold water. He stared at her, glasses clinging to the tip of his nose. "Do you do this all the time?" he asked.

"No," Pallas lied, a bit breathless. She started to tug on her haphazard hair as she had earlier - a nervous habit. "Just today." Most of the things that happened were on accident. This was the first time she'd acted out on purpose.

Blue Eyes smiled; a blinding, Colgate white smile.

Then the yelling started.

Hands grabbed Pallas' waist and tugged her out of the small puddle. Sally, scolding Pallas, pulled her away from the tank.

Pallas looked over her shoulder. The lobsters were already gone. She didn't seem to notice her arm was no longer numb from the cold and dry. Blue Eyes still stood in the puddle. He picked up Pallas' abandoned blue gatorade bottle and waved good-bye. Pallas tried the dig her heels into the ground, so Sally could stop and let her go back so she could ask Blue Eyes his name.

Sally just walked faster.


	3. iii

In Pallas' personal opinion, people take reality for granted.

When a person is dreaming, they don't truly know and acknowledge they were dreaming. As soon as they wake up, they'll know their dream was a dream and whatever happened in it, good or bad, wasn't real. All people knew was that their world was real, and that's all that mattered and all they'll ever need to know.

People take that, too, for granted.

For two years after that fateful day in the supermarket, Pallas had thought she'd really set the lobsters free. She believed they'd crawled their way back to the harbour and lived happily ever after. Once she turned ten, Sally found out that Pallas thought she was a lobster savior.

She also figured out that, to Pallas, all lobster were bright red.

And one by one the kindly mother broke down Pallas' beliefs.

First, she told Pallas that she hadn't set any lobsters 'free'. Pallas had gotten her arm into the tank before Sally appeared and pulled her away, streaming out embarrassed apologies.

Secondly, she explained lobsters were only bright red after they were boiled. Pallas didn't believe her, of course, because she had never seen them in any other color.

Sally never mentioned Blue Eyes, and so Pallas didn't have to ask. Her first ever friend she'd gained on her own was a hallucination: a grand sparkling entry on her resume as a crazy person.

Then Smelly Gabe persisted Sally into taking Pallas to a child therapist, and she'd gotten her first real introduction to the world of insane.

Schizophrenia isn't supposed to manifest until the 'victim's' late teens, at the earliest, but Pallas was a special case at eight (maybe even younger then that - they couldn't be positive). She was diagnosed at thirteen. _Paranoid_ was tacked on a little while later, after she had verbally attacked a librarian for trying to trick Pallas into getting a propaganda pamphlet for an underground Communist force operating in the basement of the public library.

Pallas' medication helped sometimes. She knew it was working when the world wasn't as colorful or interesting as it normally was. Like when she could tell the lobsters in the tank were, in fact, _not_ a bright red. Or when she realized checking her food for tracers was ridiculous. (She did it anyways, because it subdued the tingle of paranoia on the back of her neck.)

She also knew it was working when she couldn't remember things clearly, feeling like she hadn't slept for days, and tried to put her clothes on backwards.

Half the time, it felt to Pallas as if the doctors weren't all that sure of what the medication would do. " _Well, it should lessen the paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations. But we're going to have to wait and see. Oh, and you'll most likely feel tired at times. Drink lots of fluids while you're at it - you'll be dehydrated very easily. Also, it could cause some fluctuation in your weight. Really, it's up in the air_."

The doctors offered large quantities of help, but Pallas became irritated and developed her own system of figuring out what was real and what wasn't.

She took pictures.

Over time, the real remained in the photo as the delusions dripped away. Pallas quickly discovered what sorts of things her mind was particularly fond of making up. Like billboards whose occupants wore gas masks and reminded passerby that poison gas from Hitler's Nazi Germany was still a fairly real threat.

Pallas didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. She wouldn't say she hated people who did, because that was almost everyone. Pallas didn't hate them. They didn't live in her world.

But that never stopped her from wishing she lived in theirs.


End file.
